‘She knows you are here,’ Nicholas whispered.
‘More strawberries,’ Portia muttered, as she settled down again to sleep.
Alethea laughed more spontaneously than she had laughed for a long time.
‘She is dreaming of something much sweeter than me,’ she said.
‘I expect she smelt strawberries on your hands,’ said Nicholas.
Alethea had not realized how tired she was, but as they left the nursery, her foot stumbled, and she almost fell.
‘You are quite worn out,’ Nicholas exclaimed. ‘You ought to be in bed. We won’t talk till to-morrow.’
Alethea knew that she had come to the end of her strength, and she thought that she was too tired to sleep. Instead, she fell asleep the moment she got into bed, and the complete oblivion of the night prepared her to face the ordeals of the morning. For there was much to be faced.
Not until she came out of her bedroom in the morning, did she begin to see the meaning of the changes in Brokeyates. The house seemed only half awake. It had the unfriendly air of a place given up to dust-sheets. No housemaid appeared to have swept in the long gallery which ran the length of the first floor, and the windows at its two ends were still shuttered. She went to the gay little room looking upon the garden, where she and Nicholas had always breakfasted in the summer, and she found that the door was locked. She opened it, and looked in. It was given up to cobwebs. She found Nicholas in the dining-room. Once more, there was no silver on the table. A copper kettle spat above an earthenware teapot.
‘I looked for you in the breakfast room,’ she said.
‘I haven’t used that this year,’ he answered. ‘After breakfast, we must talk.’
She shrank from the idea. It was true that she had not come home to what she had most dreaded, for she and Nicholas still loved each other. They had known that last night. They had found themselves far nearer to each other than they had been since the birth of Hans. She herself had been amazed at her own feelings, for there had been times in Bavaria when she had believed that her love for Nicholas was utterly dead. When she saw him again, she had been aware of nothing but the old tender passion. Nicholas was her man. She loved him, and she knew that he loved her.
Still, she realized that Tante Helena had been right when she said that it was possible for two people who really loved each other, yet to find themselves actually in opposition. And on the question of the attitude of Nicholas towards Hans, she felt that they could not agree. She dreaded the thought of their speaking about that, and yet she knew that it must come.
Nicholas was reading his letters, and she watched him as she had often watched him before. She remembered Lady Uffcote’s words: ‘The Roxerbys are men who cannot change.’ It was true of Nicholas. He had not changed in his love for her, in spite of all that had happened. Must his feelings for Hans be equally unchangeable?
Alethea clung to the hope that her child might not be incurably a dwarf. She still believed it possible for him to grow into a normal man. But even if this could never be, she recognized in Hans a disposition rare enough to surmount physical disabilities, however pitiable. And she knew that he must always possess something of that unearthly beauty which had belonged to him from his birth. She meditated as to how she could bring this home to her husband, and she saw how difficult it must be. He had obstinately refused to look at his son, and he had never really known what the child was like. Now Alethea understood that he saw Hans in his mind, as a deformity like his own mother. How could she set to work to drive out such an impression? It would be, as Tante Helena had called it, an act of exorcism.
When breakfast was over they went to the library, the room which Nicholas had always used as a sitting-room. They were both tongue-tied in face of the explanations which lay before them. Alethea fumbled in her mind seeking for the right words in which to tell Nicholas that she was sorry she had gone away when he was so unhappy; but before she could find them, he began to speak.
‘Dear Alethea,’ he said. ‘When I heard you were coming back, I knew that you had found it possible to forgive me for the frightful things I said and did when I drove you out of this house. You must have seen then what I was—what I can be—a cad and a maniac. I thought you would never be able to pardon it, but you have. How can I thank you?’
She tried to silence him, taking his hand, and caressing it.
‘Let us forget that day, Nicholas. We neither of us knew what we were doing.’
‘But the wrong which I did you before was far more unpardonable—an inexpiable sin.’
‘Dear Nicholas, when I learnt the secret of your hidden misery, I learnt what made you feel as you did about Hans.’
Her voice shook.
He interrupted her.
‘I am going further back than that,’ he said. ‘I ought never to have asked you to be my wife. I should not have married at all. That I did. It cannot be undone or forgiven.’
‘Nicholas dear, what nonsense! I should never have forgiven you if you hadn’t!’
She tried to smile, and to make him smile.
‘It was stupidity on my part, rather than malice,’ he said.
‘Malice?’ She repeated the word.
‘I was fool enough to think’, he went on, ‘that this curse was a thing outside myself, something that was over and done with when I turned my back on Australia. I thought it could never follow me here.’
‘But my dear it was better for us both that I should see your mother. We must always have been apart while I was ignorant of what mattered so terribly to you. I knew that you were keeping me in some way outside your life, and that was really why we were so unhappy all that time. Agonizing as that day was at the time, I shall be glad of it, if you will only feel that though you couldn’t tell me about your mother, now I know, and that makes it all right.’
‘You don’t yet understand what I mean. I am not thinking of my having kept this secret from you, and so appearing not to trust you. That was bad enough. But I ought not to have married, I am that woman’s son, I have her blood in me. I am a tainted man.’
The despair in his face filled her eyes with tears.
‘Hans,’ she said. ‘ But Hans is not like …’
He stopped her.
‘I am not thinking of Hans. I don’t want to think of him. I am speaking of myself.’
‘Of yourself?’ she said, puzzled.
‘Yes Alethea, of myself. Dwarf’s blood is bad blood, and I have it in my veins. You wouldn’t guess it, would you, to look at me? But now I know that it is that which has always been wrong with me. It makes me hate the world, and it makes me always afraid of my fellow men. Yes, I know you will say that people think me prouder than other people, and think that I am only too ready to defy them; but that is only to hide my secret fear. When I was at school, the boys used to laugh at me about my mother. It made me hate her and them. Then I came over here, and I thought I was free of it all. But no. I am not. I must hate anyone or anything that reminds me of it. The hatred is stronger than I am myself.’
She knew what he meant. She knew that, now, he was thinking of Hans. She was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the situation.
Suddenly he broke into sobs, and she felt for him the utter humiliation which she knew he suffered when he cried before her.
‘Alethea, be sorry for me. You know it all now. Save me from myself. Try to love me still, though you know that I have the soul of a dwarf. It means that I shall always be a coward.’
She took his hand.
‘If you are a coward,’ she said, ‘you are also a very brave man, for you can look your cowardice in the face, and that is the most frightening thing in the world. But now, having once faced it, don’t look at it any more. If you do, it will drag you down. Look at me Nicholas. You see how I have to look up at you. You are no dwarf. All that horror is left in Australia. You thought that you were going to forget it, and you can. You must.’
‘Alethea, it is no use. I am caught in a trap. I can’
t get out. I’m tied up in it, for it is myself. I must stay in it till I die.’
His eyes flamed with the torture she seemed always to have known.
‘I shall not let you speak of it again,’ she said. ‘What you have said makes no difference to me. The person who is caught in a trap naturally thinks that his trap is the whole world. He can’t see beyond it. But if someone opens the cage for him and lets him out, he sees that the world is bigger, and less cruel than he thought. I shall open your trap for you. I am here to set you free.’
‘Alethea, I worship you,’ he said. ‘But I know that I must go on making you miserable. I can’t help it, and now you know why. There are things I cannot do, and you must go on forgiving me, for I have told you that I am a coward.’
Her heart sank, for she knew what he meant. He was trying to tell her that he could never face the sight of Hans, for that must always remind him of his curse.
‘You won’t always be a coward,’ she said. But she felt hopeless.
Chapter Sixteen
IT TOOK Alethea several days to discover the extent of the changes which Nicholas had made at Brokeyates while she was away; and she was completely unprepared for them. It was true that she had been present when he had so violently declared that he would never touch another penny which came from Australia; but that afternoon she had thought of nothing but the threat to Hans. Even if she had heard what was said about the money, she would not have taken in all that it implied. Who could have foreseen that the fatal half hour which Mrs. Roxerby spent in her son’s house was to result in a complete revolution in his mode of life in it? After she went away, Alethea had certainly never given another thought to the possible consequences of her husband’s determination to cut himself off completely from all connection with Australia.
Now she found that the motor car which had met her at the station was the only car which Nicholas still possessed; while the man who had driven it was the only man he employed, except the labourers on the farm. It was no wonder that she had thought the park untidy and neglected, for no one had touched it since the early spring. The closed shutters, which that night had given to the house so forbidding an aspect, meant that most of the rooms were shut up; and in the parts which were still occupied, Nicholas and Portia were living in what seemed to Alethea quite unnecessary squalor. The very capable servants whom she had left at Brokeyates had been replaced by two or three raw girls from neighbouring villages. They were quite untrained and knew nothing of their work. The house was dirty, and the cooking bad.
Colonel Bracton had not been well off, and Alethea had all her life kept house upon a small income; but Radway had never known the discomforts which Nicholas had accepted as being the inevitable lot of a poor man. At first Alethea did not know how to begin putting things to rights, for economy is difficult in a house designed for luxury; and the servants whom Nicholas had engaged resented the orders of a mistress of whose existence they had hardly been aware. They were sulky and disobliging, and she found that she must get rid of them all, and make a fresh start.
This meant that her first few months at home were full of unexpected difficulties. Friedenbach seemed a long way off, and the prospect of going back there looked very remote. Alethea could not think how she was to find either the time or the money for the frequent visits to Bavaria which she had promised herself.
Her longing to be there was sometimes more than she could bear, and yet she could never speak of it to Nicholas. She saw that in some ways he was almost a madman, and she treated him as such. His mania centred round the thought of Hans, and therefore the child’s name could not be spoken in his presence. He checked the least reference to his son by that miserable look in his eyes which Alethea had learnt to dread.
Silently he drove in upon her two assumptions which were in future to underlie their existence. He insisted that she should recognize that to see or to speak of Hans must necessarily remind him of his mother, and so bring back into his life all that which had poisoned his youth. And secondly he affected to be convinced by Alethea’s own letter to him written from Friedenbach, saying that the place suited Hans, and that his best hope of health lay in his remaining there. There was something uncanny in the way in which he impressed these decrees upon Alethea, when the subject of Hans was never mentioned between them. It was something which they both knew without words.
Nicholas was one of those men who can only look in one direction, and who are blind to anything which is not directly in their line of sight. He was honestly unaware of Alethea’s feelings. He adored his wife, and would have been horrified at the suggestion that he was acting selfishly towards her; but it seemed to him established that there were certain things which he could not be expected to bear. He did not see that, because of this, Alethea was expected to bear a great deal.
Alethea realized that she was nearer to Nicholas than she had ever been. There was something touching in the way in which he leant upon her now that he knew that there were no secrets between them. She found that she was becoming as sensitive as he was himself, to any chance remark which could possibly be construed into an allusion to dwarfs. This was not because, like Nicholas, she suspected the speakers of wilfully shooting a barbed arrow in his direction; but because she knew that he would suspect this, and that nothing would disabuse him of the idea. He thought Alethea almost cruel when she tried to reassure him. He hugged his suspicions of his neighbours, and would not believe her when she told him that as they none of them knew that his mother was a dwarf, they couldn’t possibly be gibing at him about it. Alethea began to think that there had been something in what he said when he had averred that the ‘ dwarf’s blood’ in his veins had given him the mind of a dwarf in his finely built body.
When she compared his disposition with the radiant nature of his little son, she told herself that it was far happier to be outwardly a dwarf than to grow up with this inner warping of the mind.
Portia too was something of a care to Alethea. Nicholas had sent away her very expensive nurse, and the young girl whom he had engaged to succeed her, had allowed the child to get completely out of hand. She was a wilful little thing, and seemed to have not much affection in her nature. Alethea wondered whether the little girl had not inherited some of those mental qualities which had made Nicholas so unhappy a man. If so, they influenced her in an entirely opposite way. Like her father, she was an egoist, and was very much affected by what people thought of her. But, unlike him, she only listened to what was agreeable to her. She was as vain as her father was proud, and even at the age of three, she was well aware that she was pretty. More than any thing, she enjoyed being taken to see some village woman, who would say what a pretty little lady she was, and how tall for her age, or would admire her blue eyes, and her pink sash.
Portia was a most determined young person. She always knew what she wanted, and she generally knew too how to get possession of it; but it seemed to Alethea that she always wanted uninteresting things. She had none of the imagination which Hans, long before he could speak, had succeeded in showing that he possessed. He had always responded so quickly to the stories told him by his mother, and after her months with him in Bavaria, it was crushing to come back to Portia’s matter-of-fact mind. Alethea showed her pictures and told her about the Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Beanstalk. Portia thought these fairy stories merely silly, and she looked at her mother with a superior air, as if she wondered how anyone could attend to such nonsense. She liked facts; and was really interested in learning how bananas were brought from Jamaica to England; how straw hats were made at Luton; and whether the women in Constantinople slept on iron bedsteads or not. Alethea found it difficult to keep her daughter supplied with all the information she desired on these and kindred topics.
In many ways, she was happy. She did not mind being poor, and in fact she really enjoyed the contact with household affairs from which she had hitherto been debarred by her staff of excellent servants. As there was now only one housemaid, Alethea took
charge herself of the wood panelling and the fine old furniture, and she prided herself on keeping it in perfect condition. She no longer allowed the unused corridors to vaunt their shuttered and melancholy darkness before the eyes of everyone who came upstairs; but she shut them out of sight with some very valuable old lacquer screens which she carried up from the picture gallery.
Nicholas was as busy as his wife, and he too enjoyed his life. He was always in the Park, clearing away thistles and nettles, lopping off dead branches, and making bonfires of the rubbish. He worked hard in the garden too, and he and Alethea assured themselves that no one could guess that they had parted with the six or seven men whom they used to employ in the flower garden.
So time went on, and Alethea found that more than three months had gone before she could find it at all possible to go back to Friedenbach. She heard from Tante Helena two or three times a week, and the news of Hans was always good. He was well and happy. Alethea found to her shame that she was almost hurt by this continued good news. Hans was so happy without her: she was becoming unnecessary to him. Sometimes she felt a fierce jealousy against Tante Helena. It was unfair that another woman should rob the mother of the joy of those passing months of ever-changing child life.
In September, Alethea saw that it was becoming more possible for her to go away. The household was now working smoothly in a routine which might go on without her for a time. The garden made less demands, so that Nicholas could do without her there for a while. But she did not know how to frame the words which would tell him that she was going to Bavaria. She really feared him where Hans was concerned, and now, not only was the name of Hans, but the name of Bavaria too, among the subjects which were taboo between them. When she tried to say she was going away, her heart beat furiously, and her tongue dried in her mouth.
So she made her arrangements, and said nothing about them to Nicholas till the day before she meant to leave. Then she told him, as calmly as she could, that she must be away for a week, as she was obliged to see Countess Friedenbach about various arrangements for the child, his winter clothes, and so on. She found that she was actually making excuses for going to see her own child, and this made her ashamed, but she could not treat Nicholas as a normal man.
Dwarf's Blood Page 12
